A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  Young Jewel was already nearly as tall as the man who went by Pap during his father’s next visit, old enough to understand that his father abandoning them was his choice.

  “I ought to have been mad,” he told Harold. “But you know a boy, he needs his father. And if he doesn’t have him, he needs to justify his absences and make believe he loves you. That there’s the one makes it hard to keep up the pretense. You know what I mean?”

  The unexpected sentiment hit home with Harold, whose own father had been in and out of his life, mostly out, since as far back as he could remember.

  “Is your last name MacAllen, like his?”

  Jewel nodded. “He was my old man, all right, and I got the name. They called me Jam ’cause them’s the initials, you just swap around the capitals. But Pap, he weren’t quite the hermit folks think.”

  He told Harold that for a stretch of years, three, maybe four, his father visited in March or April, when the Montana snows rusted away and the roads became quagmires of mud and the muskrat and beaver pelts had lost their winter value. He’d come in on the Greyhound and would bunk at the hunting camp Jewel’s mother’s people had let decay back into the swamp. The only structure remaining was a low, rambling shotgun affair built on stilts out over the water, with the limbs of a cypress tree muscling in through broken windows. Jewel would skip school and sleep on the screened-in porch, and the two generations of MacAllens would pull the crab traps, run trotlines, and net mullets. Jewel had never seen anyone as handy with a cast net as his old man. It was during those times that Scott had passed on his woodcraft.

  “It saved my life in ’Nam,” Jewel told Harold with matter-of-factness, “knowing what he taught me. He was as much at home in the swamp as these mountains.”

  Jewel had traveled up to Montana only once, as a teenager, after his dad was decommissioned out of Hitler’s war. They had spent the fall and winter running Scotty’s trapline and hunting coyotes—you got a dollar bounty for every tail you brought in—staying in caves and makeshift lean-tos except for the coldest weeks, when they sheltered here at the homestead. Already abandoned for a quarter of a century, the cabin had fallen into disrepair, but they had made it livable. It was here, Jewel said, that he had one of only three conversations with his father that strayed beyond the comfortable borders of hunting, trapping, and weather. His father talked about growing up in Shelby, Montana, up on the Hi-Line, a hard life on a hard piece of earth with a hard mother and a weak father who died when he was seven. The words had been coaxed out of him by a bottle of brandy, and the talk ran out when the bottle ran dry.

  “Them two wars, they just cut the tongue out of him,” Jewel said.

  When the spring came, Jewel had hitched into White Sulphur Springs to catch a bus back to Florida. He was sixteen, had all the formal schooling he would ever get, and told Harold that his father had foreseen Johnson getting dragged down into the conflict in Vietnam and told him to keep his head down and he’d come out of it on the other end, and when he did, not to run away from life like he had.

  “He said it was too late for him, but it wasn’t for me,” Jewel said, shaking his head. “Old Pap, he hugged me the only dang time I can remember him doing it. It’s been near fifty years and I ain’t got the smell out yet.” Harold noticed the tear at the corner of Jewel’s left eye.

  The next time Jewel saw his father, he was ashes in a box that his mother went to Montana to retrieve after receiving a call from the ranch that had employed him. She died two years later. He said he’d brought his father’s ashes to spread, the Smith Canyon being the only real home he’d ever had.

  Harold remembered the bone chips he’d found at the sites of the scarecrows. One mystery solved.

  “How did you get here?” Harold asked.

  Jewel seemed to think about it. “I assumed it was the natural way, a man and a woman and a little bit of mischief-making’s all it takes. Though some that’s seen me may have formed their own opinion, think I’m more like that creature from the lake.”

  “No, I mean how did you get to Montana? Did someone give you a ride?”

  He took offense at the question. “I done got a bank account, got my disability. I got a short-bed Tacoma looks a lot newer than I do.”

  “Where did you park it?”

  “I met a fella said I could leave it at his place. Called it a compound. Weren’t like no compound I ever seen, more like shacks is all, couple steps up from this place you want the honest truth. It ain’t but a hour hike down to the river from there and wouldn’t raise no suspicion.”

  “You mean hike down to here? The homestead?”

  “No, the trail comes down at that Table Rock, on down the river a piece.”

  Table Rock Campground was where Harold had told Marcus to wait for him.

  “Just some folks living off the grid,” Jewel was saying. “Call themselves the Rural Free Montanans. They even got a flag. Got no sewer, got no electricity but, like, generators, just living with their middle finger out, saying fuck you to the government. You got your folks like that all over the place nowadays.”

  Yes, Harold thought. But how many are this close to the Smith River?

  He was thinking of the man who had called himself Job, whose poaching ring he had infiltrated, who had threatened to separate his gall bladder from the rest of his organs not more than two months ago. He’d called himself a Rural Free Montanan. If it was that man, it was quite a coincidence.

  But on second thought, maybe not. Harold knew that Job lived in the Little Belt Mountains, and that he would hang out in bars was more or less a given. In fact, it was at a bar that he’d met him. If you thought of it that way, any two men who lived within forty miles of White Sulphur Springs and had a thirst that only a draft beer could satisfy were destined to meet in one or another of the town’s establishments. The odds of Jewel MacAllen striking up a conversation with Job were better than they might appear to an outsider.

  “One of these men,” Harold said. “He wouldn’t have a scarred hand? Big fella tall as you, maybe fifty, hangs around with a short guy looks like a garden gnome?”

  “Rayland Jobson.” Jewel nodded. “It’s his tater patch where I left my truck. Got a right hand with a hump, looks sorta like a blue crab.”

  Harold felt as if his chest wall was lined with a sheet of ice that cracked halfway into the inhalation. Spears of cold white pain shot through his body.

  “And how might you have met this man?” he said, feeling the ice settle in his chest.

  “He was in the Mint with his brother-in-law, pretty sure it’s that little feller you’re talking about. I guess they looked at me and saw a kindred spirit. Wouldn’t be the first time people mistook my appearance for my character.”

  “When was this?”

  “’Bout a month ago, I’d say. I hadn’t been in town but for a few days. I was stocking up on supplies and wondering how the devil I’d get up and down the river.”

  “Look at me, Jewel,” Harold said. “I want you to tell me the truth. Did you tell these men about the scarecrows?”

  Jewel looked down at the floorboards between them.

  “I might could have. Yeah, I s’pose I did. I recall telling him I got the idea from the scarecrows I seen in the Mekong in the rice paddies, that I seen one that was a man, like a Jesus on the cross, except he was one from our company and he was dead. That stuck with me. When I heard about the mine they wanted to put on the river and got it into my head to carry on the watch, I thought of that scarecrow.”

  “They called your father the Smith River Watchman. Did you know that?”

  “I heard it from him. He showed me a newspaper with a story somebody wrote about him. Kept it folded in a book.”

  “Back to this Jobson. What do you know about him?”

  “Just what I tole you. He let me park my truck. Why? You got bad blood with him?”


  “I don’t believe so. Why would you think that?”

  “Just that he got himself a hard-on about the Native American. This fellow was out there on the sidewalk, Job, like, made a gun out of his hand and said ‘Bang’ and blew the smoke out of the barrel. I said, ‘What you got against Indians?’ He said he’d been betrayed by one, that the next time he saw him he was going to snap a cap on him.”

  “He said that?”

  “Just as sure as you’re sitting across from me. Y’all got a beef with this fellow it ain’t really none of my concern.”

  Harold thought of Marcus. He was alone now, his son, in a canoe with cliffs all around shot with caves. What if Harold was the man that Job intended to snap a cap on? What if he was sitting behind the trigger of a rifle in one of those caves, waiting for him to float past?

  You’re being paranoid, Harold told himself. Job never had an inkling that Harold was undercover. And even if he had, how would Job know he was floating the Smith River? Harold had only known himself two days before he launched.

  The logic didn’t assure him. Harold remembered the reflections on the surface at Indian Springs, when he and Marcus had knelt side by side to examine the sculpin. He recalled Sean Stranahan’s comment that the two looked alike, or would when Marcus grew into his father’s frame. It didn’t matter if Marcus wasn’t Harold. All that mattered was that through the crosshairs of a rifle scope he could appear to be.

  “They’s something else,” Jewel said. “I can take you there, but you ain’t going to like it.”

  Harold breathed deeply. The ice had melted, to be replaced by a feeling of cold water pooling in his gut, shrinking his insides.

  He listened to the river below the homestead. Last night, when he’d staked out the cabin, he could barely hear it. But twenty-four hours of snowmelt had changed that. The color of the water had gone from an opaque olive to a sickly tan color. It had doubled in size and would double again and again as the thick mantling of snow shrank from the crags. And somewhere down that river a young man who was the only future Harold could see was caught in the runoff, hurtling toward what, toward whom?

  “Not going to like what?” Harold said.

  Across from him, Jewel MacAllen turned the key of the lamp, raising the wick to draw the last drops of kerosene. But it was too late. Harold heard him take the Lord’s name in vain, and then there was a single flicker before the world went black.

  PART TWO

  HARD ROCK HELL

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Death in Eden

  Sean Stranahan was adding jungle cock nails to the fly clamped in the jaws of his tying vise when he heard a ringing on the travertine floor. The stenciling on the frosted window of the door to his art studio read BLUE RIBBON WATERCOLORS and, underneath, in a discreet script, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS. The footsteps stopped at the door, and there was a long moment when he imagined someone reading the words and deciding whether to knock, or would have if he didn’t already suspect who it was from the cadence of the steps.

  “Come in, Sheriff,” he said.

  The door opened—Martha Ettinger in her khakis, duty belt riding her iliac crest, cuffs on the back, Taser, .357 Ruger. She drummed her fingers on the grips of the revolver while her eyes roamed the artwork on the walls. Sean saw her looking at a study of a man with a snowy beard who was sitting at an outdoor bar with palm trees. Bony fingers hunted at the keys of a manual typewriter. A small cat perched on the man’s shoulder. The man was someone Sean had known, who believed that he could summon the pen, if not the spirit, of Ernest Hemingway. He had devoted the last years of his life to trying to finish a story that he believed the great writer had started, but never completed. Under the table, by the man’s bare feet, were three dead mice, courtesy of, presumably, the cat.

  “I call it Three Dead Mice,” Sean said.

  “We’re painting ghosts now, are we?”

  It was a literal assessment. The figure was hinted at rather than boldly stroked, and in poor light might not be there at all, the chair empty, the painting a still life with a wisp of smoke, the typewriter and the three mice.

  “You didn’t come here to critique my art,” he said.

  “No. And for the record, I like it.” She paused. “I like you, too, but I’m mad at you.”

  “What did I do this time?”

  “It’s what you didn’t.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t be able to call for a couple days. It’s the Bob Marshall Wilderness.”

  “A couple days was a couple days ago.”

  “They wanted to stay another night.”

  Sean had picked up a couple of clients after the party had floated through to Eden Bridge, driven directly to Gibson Reservoir, then backpacked up the North Fork of the Sun River to fish for cutthroat trout. He’d just got back the night before, and, rather than drive out to Martha’s place, had slept on the couch in his studio.

  “I know,” Martha said. “I just wished you’d stuck around.”

  Sean could sense something was wrong from her posture. She couldn’t seem to get comfortable, had been shifting her weight from one foot to the other since she’d opened the door.

  “What happened, Martha? Bart Trueblood, he’s okay, isn’t he?”

  “I think so. He had some kind of relapse, something about his platelet count, but he’s up and crowing last I heard.”

  “The snake incident will be good for Lillian’s documentary.”

  “Won’t it, though?” She smiled thinly. “But I didn’t come here to talk about her, or Trueblood, or the mine. Or even you not calling.”

  “Then what’s up?”

  Sean saw the smile die on her lips, and the Martha who took a chair was as sober as he had ever seen her. He sat down opposite her at the fly-tying table, feathers in a half-dozen hues littering the expanse of wood between them.

  She looked at the fly in his vise, said “Pretty,” then raised her eyes. “What’s up,” she said, “is a corpse floating in the Smith River.”

  Stranahan’s face must have registered his alarm.

  “No, it’s not who you’re thinking,” Martha said. “The floater is Caucasian.”

  “Harold’s okay, though. His son? They came out okay. Right?”

  “You’re talking like a man trying to convince himself,” Martha said. “I did, too, at first. No, I can’t swear that he is okay. Or Marcus. Neither of their canoes ever made it to Eden Bridge. Harold’s canoe was found about a mile below Table Rock, bent around a rock in the river. Not too far from where the body was discovered. There was a bullet recovered in some of his gear. Point two five six caliber. One of the copper petals that peeled from the core had bits of human tissue lodged in it. Janice Thorp, Harold’s sister, has provided her own DNA for comparison. No word yet. Marcus’s canoe never did surface, so to speak. I have a bad feeling about this. If you’d bothered to call me, you would have known, you might even have been able to help.”

  Silence fell across the table. In the breeze flowing in from the open windows, the feathers stirred, looking like colorful birds attempting to take wing.

  “No, that’s not fair,” Martha said. “You probably couldn’t have added anything to what Lillian Cartwright and your buddy, Sam, already told us.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A helicopter pilot on training maneuvers from Malmstrom Air Force Base spotted the canoe Monday. He made another pass lower and that’s when he spotted the body. Harold’s been missing . . . Well, that’s the thing. We’re not sure. He wasn’t on a timetable, but it’s been four days now since he was supposed to meet Marcus and I’m worried.”

  “Marcus stayed with us one night, said he was going to canoe on down to Table Rock where his dad was supposed to meet him.”

  “So Sam told us.”

  “I tried to talk him out of it. We could have made room in the raft an
d left a note for Harold. But he had his mind made up, and I know he made it safe as far as Table Rock.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “What about the body, the floater? Any clues there?” Sean was thinking of the Scarecrow God.

  “Well, for starters,” Martha said, “he doesn’t have a head.”

  * * *

  —

  He didn’t have fingers or toes, either. What he did have was a hole in the left upper quadrant of his chest that was through and through, consistent with a wound caused by a high-powered rifle bullet. That, not drowning, was determined to be the cause of death by the county medical examiner.

  Martha stirred her fingers among the feathers on Sean’s table as she thought back.

  The call from the Cascade County sheriff, Andrew Cashell, had come in the day after the discovery of the body. Martha, who had crossed paths with Cashell before on a dual-jurisdiction case, remembered a chewing gum habit, a moonlike face with walnut cracker cheeks, and cold blue X-ray eyes that betrayed a shrewd mind, one that he invariably kept under the crown of a straw Stetson, winter and summer. She remembered Cashell’s habit of arguing with his hands, counting up his points by tapping his fingers.

  He told her that the ranger at Camp Baker had informed him about Harold’s assignment. He wanted Martha’s opinion of Harold, knowing that he’d worked as a deputy sheriff in her department.